【Switzerland】

Is hardware really that hard?Switzerland

OnePlus pointed to the borderline-cliché catchphrase, "Hardware is hard" at its event on Thursday to launch its latest flagship smartphone, the OnePlus 5T. But the company's own product release schedule appears to belie the saying, with the 5T coming a mere five months after its predecessor, the OnePlus 5.

However, if you look at OnePlus' ambitious launch timeline and conclude the opposite -- that hardware is easy -- you'd be jumping to the wrong conclusion. The China-based company has simply gotten really good at leveraging its natural advantages (for instance, its proximity to prototype facilities in Shenzhen) to fuel its nimbleness.

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OnePlus also earns its reputation as a bold upstart. It doesn't think in the same new-flagship-every-year-on-the-dot terms as bigger brands like Samsung and LG. The company just ships phones when they're ready, and the "T" suffix it's attached to second-gen releases is an unsubtle dig at Apple's biannual "S" upgrades.

SEE ALSO: Let's take a trip down iPhone memory lane

Still, are they going toofast, even for an upstart? Like other mobile manufacturers, OnePlus has had some optically bad software issues over the past few months. First, it was reported OnePlus phones were harvesting data on customers in questionable ways, and then there was the "Engineer Mode" discovery -- a potential backdoor for hackers, at least those who got a hold of your device.

OnePlus Head of Marketing Kyle Kiang (pronounced "jong") drops in on the MashTalk podcast to set the record straight on those incidents, explain why the OnePlus 5T is coming so hot on the heels of the OnePlus 5, and reveal how he is able to tell the OnePlus story at a company that does very little traditional marketing.

You can subscribe to MashTalk on iTunesor Google Play, and we'd appreciate it if you could leave a review. Feel free to hit us with questions and comments by tweeting to @mashtalkor attaching the #MashTalk hashtag. We welcome all feedback.

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